A MODEL OF RACIAL RESIDENTIAL HISTORY AND ITS ASSOCIATION WITH SELF-RATED HEALTH AND MORTALITY AMONG BLACK AND WHITE ADULTS IN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

We construct a dynamic racial residential history typology and examine its association with self-rated health and mortality among black and white adults. Data are from a national survey of U.S. adults, combined with census tract data from 1970–1990. Results show that racial disparities in health and mortality are explained by both neighborhood contextual and individual socioeconomic factors. Results suggest that living in an established black neighborhood or in an established interracial neighborhood may actually be protective of health, once neighborhood poverty is controlled. Examining the dynamic nature of neighborhoods contributes to an understanding of health disparities.

This research was supported by NIH grant (R01 AG20247) (Robert), and postdoctoral training grant (T32 AG00129) (Ruel), both from the National Institute on Aging to the Center for Demography of Health and Aging at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual Population Association of America conference, May 1–3, 2004, Boston, MA. We would like to acknowledge Robert M. Adelman for his thoughtful comments and suggestions.

Notes

^a % distribution presented or means with standard deviations. For later multivariate analyses, all continuous variables were centered.

¹We primarily eliminated heavily Hispanic neighborhoods. As census tracts have grown and changed since the earlier racial residential succession studies were conceptualized and performed, we replicated the typology eliminating first tracts with 500 and then 1,000 nonwhites and nonblacks. Under these conditions, we found that black entry and black transitioning neighborhoods increased in quantity compared to the white and established neighborhoods as we allowed the number of nonwhite and nonblack minorities to increase. Thus, blacks are entering white neighborhoods, but they are also entering neighborhoods with large Hispanic populations. At this point we are unwilling to equate white dominated neighborhoods and Hispanic dominated neighborhoods; thus, we eliminated tracts with 250 or more nonwhites and nonblacks.

²Duncan and Duncan (1957), as well as Taeuber and Taeuber (1965), used 250 as a definitional cutoff for black and white tracts. This seems quite arbitrary, but actually pertains to the Census' confidentiality procedures. The census suppressed counts of minorities in areas where there were less than 250. A better method now might be to base the cutoffs on relative numbers such as percent black in a census tract. We used 250 as the initial cutoff between white and black, but then used percents to distinguish between the black neighborhood types. We performed sensitivity analyses by using various other cutoffs and found that increasing the cutoff means we have more white neighborhoods and less black neighborhoods. Decreasing the cutoff to 100, means reducing white neighborhoods, and primarily increasing the number of established interracial neighborhoods. Analyses on self-rated health and risk of death are similar with a cutoff of 100 compared to a cutoff of 250 African Americans in white neighborhoods.

³Causally, it may appear that our dependent variable and our independent variable are not in the proper time order. Self-rated health was measured in 1986 and our typology uses information from 1970, 1980, and 1990. We included 1990 because three time points are necessary to determine if there is a trend. Information from 1990 was used solely to see if the trend that was begun in 1970 and extended through 1980 remained; thus, we argue that the neighborhood typology was established prior to 1986 and is relatively stable (Davis 1985) and thus is temporally prior to our health outcomes.

⁴Because we include a long duration for the measure of mortality, we reran our analyses including a dummy indicator for moving after 1986. When we include this dummy variable, our associations between the neighborhood racial context and mortality are actually slightly stronger; thus, the results we present here are on the conservative side.

N = 1,545; ⁺p < .10; ∗p < .05; ∗∗p < .01; ∗∗∗p < .0001.

Note: The omitted dummy variables are male, white, <$10,000 in assets, and white neighborhood.

N = 1,545; ⁺p < .10;

∗p < .05;

∗∗p < .01;

∗∗∗p < .001.